Victoria’s first ever Community Health Centre, Queenscliff & District Community Health Centre (QDCHC), has celebrated its 50th birthday.
Residents, former senior staff and CEOs and many people who had a hand in fundraising over the years gathered at Bellarine Community Health Point Lonsdale this week for a photographic display to mark the occasion.
The QDCHC evolved over the decades to become what is now known as Bellarine Community Health (BCH).
The original Queenscliff Centre was the result of planning and fundraising by the local community, which began in 1948, with the founding of the Queenscliff and District Memorial Hospital Society.
Despite the community effort to establish a local hospital, government policy changed over the years and no small new hospitals would be built.
In 1969, the Hospitals and Charities Commission recommended to the committee the concept of a Community Health Centre, providing a range of health services designed to meet the social and environmental needs of the community it was to serve.
“Queenscliff was selected to be the community in which to establish a Community Health Centre and that model was to become the first of a series of similar centres which were established across the Bellarine and in other areas of Victoria,” BCH CEO Garry Ellis said.
“Queenscliff led the way in the setting up of a type of health care delivery service which has proved successful for 50 years.”
